Operators of telecommunication networks introduce various services and plans for their subscribers which not only define the price, but also the policies for traffic shaping for each of these plans. These policy decisions are based on multiple input factors like the type of the device, the location of the subscriber, his usage counters, type of subscriber (gold/platinum), kind of service being accessed and many others.
Most of the traditional policies are statically defined where they incorporate only a limited number of input factors based on which policy decisions are made. Thus, current policy decisions are limited to checking how much quota the user has used and whether that is below or above a threshold associated with the plan, and then make a decision to either stop further service or downgrade the quality of service.
Additionally, telecommunication networks currently include and/or support several different network types such as traditional circuit-switched telephone networks and more modern IP-based networks. The various legacy communication systems utilize different protocols and a subscriber may have multiple sessions and multiple services running at the same time. However most legacy services have been developed as closed silo applications, meaning they run as a standalone application handling both traffic and administration, making it difficult or impossible to combine inputs from different systems in policy decisions.
Building better policy decision rules for the operator using more and diverse input factors is currently a time consuming and costly exercise because of the current policy solution that the implementation vendors provide. Thus, there is no easy and effective way for operators of telecommunication networks to incorporate such factors into decision making at runtime to effectively manage their network without causing overloads or outages and also provide the best possible user service experience.